Really Simply Syndication

When I meet Knox­ify read­ers, I often ask if they’re an RSS sub­scriber. Sur­pris­ingly, the most com­mon response is a con­fused face.

To shed some light on RSS feeds and sub­scrip­tions, I have pro­vided a step-by-step tuto­r­ial below so that you can learn how to eas­ily fol­low all of your favorite Knoxville blogs.

This may be very ele­men­tary to a few folks but remem­ber that this was writ­ten for some­one who has never heard of RSS before.

What is RSS?
Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion or RSS is a feed from a Web site such as Knox­ify. When a new post or arti­cle is pub­lished to the home­page, it is also sent into the RSS feed.

Here at Knox­ify our feeds are located below the orange search box in the mid­dle column.

What do I do with an RSS link?
RSS feeds are excep­tion­ally help­ful when tossed into an RSS reader. Stay with me here.

RSS read­ers take the many RSS feeds of the world and orga­nize them into a hub of con­tent. Essen­tially, all of your favorite Knoxville blogs can be placed on one page, where real-time updates com­ing flood­ing in.

Since I rec­om­mend using Google Reader for RSS feeds, I’ll walk you through the quick and easy setup using the Knox­ify feed.

  1. Go to http://reader.google.com and click ‘Cre­ate an account’
  2. Com­plete the reg­is­tra­tion process just like you would for an e-mail account
  3. Once com­plete, nav­i­gate back to http://reader.google.com, where you should have an empty reader

That wasn’t too hard now was it?

I’ve got my RSS reader, now what?
Since there are mul­ti­ple browsers avail­able, I’ll pro­vide the semi-long instruc­tions. Here’s what you do.

  1. Click on ‘Entries’ and you’ll be taken to an RSS feed page
  2. Copy the URL in the address bar. This is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Knoxify for Knoxify
  3. Now, go to http://reader.google.com
  4. Click ‘Add sub­scrip­tion’ and paste in the RSS feed URL
  5. Click ‘Add’ and give it a few seconds
  6. You should now see sev­eral Knox­ify posts in right pane of Google Reader

Con­grats, you should now be an RSS feed user via your reader. Should you want to explore more ways to sub­scribe check out the help sec­tion on Google.

Now, every time one of your favorite sites posts new con­tent, it will automag­i­cally go to your RSS reader. Should you have ques­tions feel free to leave them in the com­ments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Pho­tog­ra­phy by Jacob Bøt­ter